Hot day for running today.  35 degrees in my neck of the woods.

Heat, as a rule, is a bad thing for runners.  Increase your core temperature by a mere 8 degrees, and you’ll likely die of multiple organ failure.

I thought about this while I ran today’s 20-kilometer loop, sweat pouring off of my body like I was Chris Farley’s masseur.

I also thought about the fact that the heat from the sun takes precisely 8 minutes and 16 seconds to travel from the surface of the sun to the surface of my face.  You probably already knew that.  But did you know that the energy that warms your face also had to spend between 10,000 and 1 million years traveling from the core of the sun through a soup of hydrogen 320,000 miles deep, before it reached the sun’s surface?

That means, that pesky sunshine that’s heating up your body to dangerous levels spent up to a million years (plus 8 minutes and 16 seconds) trying to get to you.  So be grateful.

Unless you’re running the 135-mile Badwater ultra-marathon in California’s Death Valley, where temperatures are likely to hit 50 degrees celcius.  Then you can complain all you want.

You’ll notice in that video that most people run on the white line at the edge of the highway.  That’s because it’s the coolest part of the road – and therefore the least likely to melt their shoes.

Looks like fun!